Question: Why are you trying to make vaccines protein based?

Leon Willis answered on 14 Mar 2022:

My work looks at protein-based medicines which treat diseases, more than being vaccines. The reason why we;re interested in using proteins is they are made out of the same building blocks that your body uses to do jobs. Also, you can design them to stick to their target in your body very specifically. Because they don’t like to stick to other targets in your body, you get fewer side-effects with protein-based medicines than their small-molecule ‘chemistry made’ equivalents.

With regards to protein-based vaccines, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines work by giving your body the chemical instructions to make the Coronavirus spike protein. This bit on the outside of the virus helps it get in your cells. It also provides a cue for your immune system to think “that’s not a human protein, we’re under attack!” and start to fight off the virus. The chemical instruction is called messenger RNA (mRNA). Your body reads its four-letter code in units of three and translates it into proteins. To make a vaccine like this is quite easy in theory; if you wanted to design a vaccine against a different virus or bacteria, or a different variant of the coronavirus for example, you would simply change the mRNA letters to code for a different protein.

The success of these new vaccines should hopefully lead to rapid vaccination against other things in the future! 🙂